Religion has its basis in superstition.

I've explicated the definition of "faith" to numerous Christians to no avail. They don't understand how words work anymore than they understand how science works.

True. Things are a lot more scary when you realize that it's all up to you, no one is coming to rescue you, there's no "man up there" looking out for you, and death is real and final so make the most of life NOW.

Bertrand Russell once said, “No satisfaction based upon self-deception is solid, and, however unpleasant the truth may be, it is better to face it once for all, to get used to it, and to proceed to build your life in accordance with it.”

I was told once: You don’t believe in anything.

I responded with: “Believe” is such an odd word to use here. I believe things based on evidence. I believe my roof won’t collapse on me in the middle of the night because, based on years of evidence and experience … it hasn’t. I believe my arms are attached to my body. Why? Evidence. I believe flying is safer than car travel based on the commonly available statistics anyone can look up. I believe those reporting those statistics did so honestly. I believe information ABOUT objects, events, people, and situations but what exactly does it mean to believe IN something? Something/someone you cannot see, that/who doesn’t speak audibly to you, that/who supposedly dictated a set of books/letters/rules to ancient Middle Eastern dudes who despite being illiterate shepherds/fishermen wrote in highly educated Greek…

I find it astounding that there are so many people who are uber skeptical of so many things in the world (government, medicine, science), yet they firmly hold onto a belief in a god that hides himself, doesn’t speak to them except through their minds, and supposedly helps them find their car keys but won’t intervene on a child being molested, won’t stop earthquakes/tornados/hurricanes, can’t do anything in his own hometown “because of their unbelief”, can’t do anything against an opposing army “because their chariots were made of iron”, and just overall is no where to be found. This entity, as described in their holy book and described by their priests and proponents, should be everywhere, readily visible, answering prayers constantly. Hospitals should be bankrupt, food banks unnecessary, and evidence of this god's existence easily found by all.

In essence, they “believe in belief” — not necessarily in their god. There’s a big difference. That's a Daniel C. Dennett reference BTW.

We do, you just keep rejecting it.
How the f**k could a subatomic ball of hot matter explode for no reason, turn into self-replicating cells, and then become complex organisms? How could an accident be so fine-tuned? Exactly. It can't. Your name is wrong, you have no idea what you're talking about.

Ah, the worn out “I don’t understand it therefore God” logic.

If believing something is possible makes it possible then. Hey, Presto, I just proved religion. Thank you for playing.

See how stupid that sounds?

Go ahead and believe in your magic trees, your talking snakes, your talking donkeys, your hands that appear out of nowhere to write prophecy on a wall and then disappear. Go ahead believing in flying unicorns. Go ahead, believing that Cellular necrosis is a reversible process.

No one believes that nothing exploded and became something. That’s the dumbest argument on the face of the planet. No one, literally NO ONE advocates this except creationists to create a strawman argument, like a bunch of little children. Little children who still believe in magic.

What DO you believe in, then? Do you believe the universe just appeared? Whatever happened to the big bang? In that story, nothing did magically explode and become something. Yes, the universe, googolplexes upon googolplexes of atoms, were all somehow condensed into one tiny ball. Then it exploded. Why? Well, you've just gotta have faith it happened! Then a hot ball had comets fall on it, cool it down, and give it some water. Okay, that's kind of believable. But then, tiny self replicating germs appeared in the water. How? Why? Well, you've just got to have faith that it happened! Then, the self-replicating bits became fish! Over millions of years, and where is the in-between fossil of microbe and fish? Well, you've just got to believe it was there! Same goes with every other stage of evolution, dinosaur and human! Where is the in-between fossil between monkey and man? Well, you've just got to believe it existed! And why is the Milky Way still a barred spiral galaxy and not some ultra-spiral galaxy? Well, you've just got to believe there's an unknown explanation!
It's not that I don't UNDERSTAND atheism, it's that I don't BELIEVE atheism.

You don't keep up with science, do you? That's pretty obvious. The number of transitional fossils boggles the mind. But what you do when presented with the evidence is demand more evidence, hand waive, and find someone with a PhD in an unrelated field because you can call him "doctor", someone who's been thoroughly discredited hundreds of times previously, to say something stupid like "Ya gotta have faith in tha big bang." What a moronic statement. Tell me you don't understand it without telling me you don't understand it. There's NEVER been any proponent of the Big Bang claim that there was nothing and then it exploded. Never. The ONLY fools making this claim are Narnia believers who try to set up strawmen so their little Sunday School Stories about magic trees, perfect gardens, nudists, and talking snakes isn't upset.

I don't believe IN anything. I believe facts based on available evidence. You're doing what all silly little Narnia believing Christians do, obfuscating, moving goalposts, changing the subject, redefining faith.

You don't BELIEVE atheism. No one does. I don't.
I simply don't believe in your god. You're an atheist on hundreds, thousands of gods throughout human history.
I just take YOUR atheism and go one god further.

Atheism is a religion.
You just don't want to admit it.
It had it's own dogma of "tiny ball of everything exploding blah blah blah".
It has it's own preachers.
It even has it's own religious symbols.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Seriously, THAT'S how you identify a religion? Is this a joke? If not, you're more mentally deficient than I thought. What, are you about 13 years old? You REALLY need some education other than that private christian "school" you attended.

Using your worthless definitions I could say that Woodworking is a religion.
Dogma: you can never have too many tools or never use red oak in cutting boards.
Preachers: Mark Spacnuolo, Norm Abram, Eric Curtis, Jason Hibbs, etc
Symbols: take a look at YouTuber's bandsaws covered in sticker symbols

I'm unfamiliar with ANY atheist symbols except one by Seth Andrews and his script "A" but that's probably a trademark.

If atheism is a religion, then celibacy is a sexual position.
If atheism is a religion, then an empty bowl is a type of food.
If atheism is a religion, then baldness is a hair style.
If atheism is a religion, then NOT collecting stamps is a hobby.
And by the way ... if atheism is a religion, it's the only one that pays taxes.

I'm going to offer you a suggestion, and it comes right out of your Bible: "Test all things; hold fast what is good." (I Thess. 5:21)

Regarding religion, Neil DeGrasse Tyson put it this way: "I remain unconvinced."

"Religions" are known to have several key components that atheism does NOT have:
1. A church (building) where attendance may be mandatory or at a minimum, expected unless you're on vacation. And you really need to reconsider any activity (travel ball) that takes you away from being in the flock (of mental sheep) on a regular basis.
2. Prayers to an unseeable deity
3. Songs to/about their deity
4. Rules … written and unwritten ... and rewritten ... screwed up and rewritten again.
5. Elected/self-appointed pastors/leaders (most overpaid) who oversee “a flock” (of sheep)
6. Sermons on a specific day of the week and sometimes 5 times per day even
7. A loooooooooong list of “Thou shalt nots” in a "Holy Book" with countless contradictions (if you'd like, I can list several hundred just off the top of my head)
8. An even longer list of requirements and arcane rules, generally formed in an agricultural, male-dominated, Middle-Eastern, bronze-age culture bent on controlling women, other men, society, property, wealth, livestock
9. Belief in the supernatural
10. Tithes, forced, unforced, and always used as a way to manipulate.

Atheism has none of these."

Try again. You failed little buddy. Badly. You may want to stop embarrassing yourself.

Nah, atheism isn't taxpaying, a lot of billionaires are atheists
(Instant proof of you being wrong)

THAT'S your comeback? I thoroughly destroyed your claim that atheism is a religion and THAT'S your response? Dude, you're embarrassing yourself.
Here is instant proof YOU'RE wrong.
Our dumbass president claimed billionaires paid only an 8.2% tax rate. Do you realize how easy that is to verify? You're probably only a kid so no, you don't I guess. Do your own Google search for "how much did USA billionaires pay in income taxes last year" and you'll find even liberal media smash this myth to pieces.

The 400 wealthiest American taxpayers actually pay an average federal income tax rate of around 23%. So you don't understand how the US Tax Code works either? Noted.

You should stop now. You brought a toothpick to a gunfight.

“Say” you were wrong? No.

I PROVED you were wrong.
You’re really pathetic in your childish and uninformed beliefs.

Are you saying I'm wrong?

Lol. Your confidence in your own ignorance is impressive. As far as you're concerned you already know everything, so you really don't need us wasting our time on you. You don't want to listen and I can talk to myself without typing it out.

I suppose the other variable is the possibility of me learning anything from you, and that laugh is almost enough to make this pointless exercise worthwhile.

If any of that is true, then I am just like you.
I guess we're both just conspiracy theorists with blind faith in what our parents or the internet told us.
You know what, even if that isn't true, let's just leave it at that.
I've stopped arguing. Now it's your turn.

Still can't get over the sound of your own voice, can you? Getting the first word and demanding the last word? Telling me to stop arguing when you pointlessly chimed in 4 hours after my last comment? On a stream you don't f**king belong on in the first place? Nah, this is fun again--I'm conducting an experiment to see how long someone with shit for brains will continue to spew it out their mouth and smear it on their face. I'm guessing indefinitely, since you've already demonstrated a categorical inability to learn. 🤣 We'll see what the data reveals. 🍿

Wow, please explain to me how you plan to do an expirement on yourself. I inferred that you were talking about yourself when you said "someone with shit for brains". I will return later for my explanation later. Goodbye!

Another argument from incredulity. Bo-ring! But about the best a theist can muster in the face of reason.

If merely believing something is impossible makes it impossible then hey presto, I just disproved religion. Thank you for playing.

What "reason" do you have? At least I give reason, unlike you, who just says "you're not giving any reason.
How about you give some reason that I am wrong in my argument.

Not *a* reason, just reason. Same word, different definition, neither of which you seem to understand. And the supposed reason you offered is a logical fallacy. I already told you which one. If you're interested in dispelling your ignorance, Google is waiting.

You don't have either, you just say "God isn't real" and never give reason or reasons.

Oh God is real, in the same way Santa Claus and the tooth fairy are real. If you mean to claim more than that, the burden of proof is on you since you're the one making the claim. Trying to shift that onus onto other people is another logical fallacy.

Well, you're the ones that enlieve that nothing exploded into everything that turned into self replicating cells that turned into dinosaurs
I don't have enough faith to believe in that

Oh, that's soooo cute! Another little strawman argument that literally NO ONE advocates or uses. Let's just file this under "STUPID THINGS CHRISTIANS SAY."

But in reality, if you'd like to read about it, Lawrence Krauss has written an entire book about this very subject. I'd bet my life you'd never read it.

And I don't mean to get all philosophical but ... what is nothing? Show it to me. I want to study it. We have ZERO examples of "nothing" so your proposition, your "point" ... is pointless.

And guess what, particles DO pop in and out of existence at the quantum level all the time.

Even if we create a perfect vacuum, there are still radio waves and gamma rays and such going through it.  We don't have any "nothing" to study. "Nothing" doesn't exist.

And even if we did have some quantity of "nothing" (how would we measure that?) and it failed to produce something during the time that we observed it, that wouldn't prove that it couldn't produce something eventually. The fact that science can't explain something right now doesn't mean that it will never be able to explain it.

There are things that we haven't (yet) explained. That doesn't mean that the answer is "God did it." It would be as if you were holding a Christmas present, all wrapped up. You might say, "I don't know where this came from. Therefore, Santa Claus exists."

"God" should not be the default response when you can't explain something. The correct answer is, "We don't know ... yet." You people said the same thing about comets, eclipses, viral outbreaks, infertility, cancer, tornados and hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, meteor showers, heart attacks, how birds fly -- the default answer isn't "God is responsible" NO -- natural processes are responsible. We know and understand many of these processes today that were once attributed to a god or gods out of the sheer ignorance you're displaying in this thread. But now, we don't need your little god to explain things. Virtually everything will eventually be figured out by science and then where will your god be? In the trash heap with 99% of all the rest of the gods in human history.

If you attribute everything (all of "creation") to God, you've set up another (bigger) question: Where did God come from?

Saying "God did it" is an attempt to solve a mystery by setting up a much bigger mystery.
And if you believe that "God always existed," LOL, I can say the same thing about the universe.

You realize that a huge worldwide flood would probably mess with the timeline just a little bit, right?

Oh MY GOD, No one ever thought of that .... do you really want to go there? I LOVE it when you guys try to pull these shenanigans. IT IS SO FUN PUTTING YOU TO SHAME.

Please, Let's DO. Please.....

What do you mean? YOU started the shenanigan. You pulled that up.

What you don't realize is I was a strong Christian for 52 years. I defended the "faith." I led Bible studies. I was a missionary to Central America. I was a staunch, argumentative apologist, much like you. I was a church planter in the Southern USA. I preached in multiple churches. I STILL know more bible verses in my head than you probably do. I went to Christian schools, Christian colleges, Bible Seminaries. I've done this whole song and dance.

And I realized, 52 years later, that it's all a farce.

Prayer doesn't work.
The bible has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of contradictions (I'm still listing them on several Excel sheets).
Jesus probably never existed (read Nailed: 10 Christian Myths that Prove Jesus Never Existed At All by former Christian, David Fitzgerald).
Listen to Dan Barker, former Baptist Minister who come to the same realization.
My own pastor who was a Doctor of Divinity at a conservative Presbyterian Church I formerly attended, could not answer my questions but simply made silly excuses. God always gets excused.

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning … The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as we choose to make it. Scary, huh? It's all up to YOU. No one is coming to save you.

Like you I expect, I don’t believe in Jupiter or Poseidon or Thor or Venus or Cupid or Sinotra or Mars or Odin or Apollo. I don’t believe in ancient Egyptian gods like Osiris, Thoth, Nut, Anubis or Horus his brother who, like Jesus and many other gods from around the world, was said to have been born to a virgin. I don’t believe in Hadad or Enlil or Anu or Dagon or Marduk or any of the ancient Babylonian gods.

I don’t believe in Anyanwu, Mawu, Ngai or any of the sun gods of Africa. Nor do I believe in Bila, Gnowee, Wala, Wuriupranili or Karraur or any of the sun goddesses of Australian aboriginal tribes. I don’t believe in any of the many Celtic gods and goddesses, such as Edain the Irish sun goddess or Elatha the moon god. I don’t believe in Mazu the Chinese water goddess or Dakuwaqa the Fijian shark god, or Illuyanka the Hittite dragon of the ocean. I don’t believe in any of the hundreds and hundreds of sky gods, river gods, sea gods, sun gods, star gods, moon gods, weather gods, fire gods, forest gods . . . so many gods to not believe in.

And I don’t believe in Yahweh, the god of the Jews.

And I do believe In Yahweh, the God of the Jews, and the resurrected Christ Jesus. You may not believe in God anymore, but I still do. And even if I'm wrong, let me live and die happy with the joy of the Holy Spirit. Or let me realize I'm wrong on my own. Either way, I want to believe and be filled with Godly joy, so please, let me believe.

Believe whichever fairy tale you choose. But keep in mind, YOU came onto an atheist page and started trying to tell me and Hanibal that because YOU can't understand science, that my name is wrong. Science has explained it. YOU just don't like where it leads. So believe your fairy tales. Believe that a disembodied hand appeared out of no where and wrote prophecy on a wall for Daniel to read ... then disappeared. Believe that a snake can talk, a donkey can talk. Believe that there are humanoid beings with wings that travel between demensions and have magical superpowers and follow directions as dictated by their boss. Believe that magic trees can make you live forever if ONLY Eve had eaten THAT fruit instead. Believe that the sun was darkened for THREE HOURS and not one actual (real) historian recorded it? Not even three other gospel writers? Believe that God got mad at Moses and decided to kill him but his wife, Zipporah (who’s father was a Midianite priest), read God's mind from afar and knew that a foreskin from her son would appease God? What is it with p**is tips? Sheesh man. Believe that YOUR loving god would actually harden the heart of a brutal dictator so HE could receive glory? How narcissistic can you get? Believe that 3 million people left Egypt and went south to cross the Red Sea, when the so-called "Promised Land" was a 3-5 day walk away from where they already were? It was about 200 miles and it took them 40 years … that’s about 432 feet per week assuming they didn’t travel on the Sabbath … even though that wasn’t in the law quite yet. Believe that three million people had enough cattle, sheep, goats, vegetables, grain, water, tools, flax, linen, pottery, lumber and firewood to survive for 40 years in the dessert but left not one shred of evidence in the form of broken pottery, wagon wheels, axles, bones, dried fossilized animal feces, campfire charcoal, or dead bodies/bones from the millions of sheep they sacrificed or from the estimated 2 million people that had to have died along the way? Believe that bread fell from heaven for 40 years, enough to feed those 3 million people? Believe that Noah was somehow able to spread unique seeds to every continent so that each continent had it’s own highly unique plants and it’s own unique animals … uh, not to mention it’s own unique fossils, unique geologic strata, unique insects, unique, bacteria, viruses, etc.

Just don't come around claiming I'm stupid for NOT believing these idiotic claims.

And guess what. If Santa Claus doesn't exist, then how did the present appear there? Did it just explode into existence? Did it slowly build up over millions of years? No, there was a rational cause. Parents (or guardians) went to the store, bought whatever is in there, came back to their house, and wrapped the thing. If you gave someone that had never seen a car in their life before the raw materials to create a car, would they be able to create a car? No. And natural processes don't even have a brain to expirement with! Nor do they have materials. They just have themselves. And rationally thinking, you know something can't create itself. And this "bigger question" of where God came from? Well, He is the person that pushes down the first domino in a hypothetical set of dominoes. There is no wind in this room with dominoes in it, and it cannot be pushed like that. Without God, or the person that pushes the first domino, the the dominoes will not fall, and the universe will never happen. God, however is uncaused, for he is the cause. He is eternal. Yes, I know that you need a mother and father for a human. But how would an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present God have a cause? That would require something more powerful, more knowing, more present. And logic can't really allow that. Besides, when people say that God did it, They don't mean he actually, say, came to somebody sick and cured them. They mean that God caused the scientists to invent a cure. After all, he already showed himself as a man, and he already healed many people directly.

Yawn. How many times have I heard this all before?

Same here, really